Media Bias Topic Page from Credo
Media Bias Overview from Canadian Points of View
Media Smarts Bias in News Sources Lesson
eBooks
Against Reform by
In Against Reform, John Pepall offers a stringent critique of proposed reforms to Canada's political institutions. Examining electoral reform, an elected or provincially appointed Senate and reduced terms for Senators, fixed election dates, recall, initiative, and parliamentary reform, including 'free votes' and parliamentary confirmation of appointments, Pepall contends that these reforms are ill-conceived and would be harmful. At the root of Pepall's critique is an argument that, in Canada today, too many voters are quick to blame institutions rather than their own conflicting interests and understandings when they do not receive what they want out of government. While considering influential factors such as academic and media bias, political fashion, and the American example, Pepall's unique and highly readable assessment takes aim at the practical and theoretical understandings of reform across party lines.
ISBN: 9780772786234Publication Date: 2010-10-16
Conservative Bias by
Before Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, there was Jesse Helms. From in front of a camera at WRAL-TV, Helms forged a new brand of southern conservatism long before he was a senator from North Carolina. As executive vice president of the station, Helms delivered commentaries on the evening news and directed the news and entertainment programming. He pioneered the attack on the liberal media, and his editorials were some of the first shots fired in the culture wars, criticizing the influence of "immoral entertainment." Through the emerging power of the household television Helms established a blueprint and laid the foundation for the modern conservative movement. Bryan Thrift mines over 2,700 WRAL-TV "Viewpoint" editorials broadcast between 1960 and 1972 to offer not only a portrait of a skilled rhetorician and wordsmith but also a lens on the way the various, and at times competing, elements of modern American conservatism cohered into an ideology couched in the language of anti-elitism and "traditional values." Decades prior to the invention of the blog, Helms corresponded with his viewers to select, refine, and sharpen his political message until he had reworked southern traditionalism into a national conservative movement. The realignment of southern Democrats into the Republican Party was not easy or inevitable, and by examining Helms's oft-forgotten journalism career, Thrift shows how delicately and deliberately this transition had to be cultivated.
ISBN: 9780813048987Publication Date: 2014-01-28
Discourses of Domination by
Discourses of Domination explores the issue of racial bias in the Canadian English-language press. Applying critical discourse analysis as their principal methodology, Frances Henry and Carol Tator investigate the way in which the media produce, reproduce, and disseminate racist thinking through language and discourse. The core of the text consists of a series of case studies, including several high-profile cases involving the alleged criminality of persons of colour. Using these case studies as a springboard, Henry and Tator demonstrate how the media construct people of colour, immigrants, refugees, and First Nations peoples as 'others' - those who live outside the 'imagined community' of Canada. Their analysis ultimately points to the tension between democratic liberalism as a defining characteristic of Canadian society and the collective racist ideology that is embedded in the dominant culture. Discourses of Domination thus provides a greater understanding of newer forms of racism, located within systems of cultural production and representation.
ISBN: 9780802084576Publication Date: 2002-05-18
Journalism Ethics for the Digital Age by
Journalism is being transformed by the digital revolution. Journalists working for media organisations are having to file and update stories across multiple platforms under increasing time pressures. Meanwhile, anyone with sufficient literacy skills and access to the internet can aspire to practise journalism, and many are doing so. And yet journalism in any form still depends for its legitimacy on the observance of ethical principles and practices. For example, it has to maintain a commitment to telling the truth, and to minimise deception and betrayal; deal with conflicts of interest; protect sources and their confidences; know how to report traumatised and vulnerable people; and know when to respect privacy. Journalism Ethics for the Digital Agecovers all these areas and more. It traces the ethics of journalism from their origins in philosophy to the new problems brought about by digital technology, with practical examples to show how these values and principles can play out in the real world. An invaluable tool for ethical decision-making, this is a book for professional journalists and citizen journalists, for students in the disciplines of journalism, media, communications, and applied ethics, and for the engaged reader everywhere.
ISBN: 9781922070951Publication Date: 2015-01-01
Tilt? by
Nine in ten Americans believe the media are biased. Trust in journalists ranks beneath that in lawyers, and even the media themselves regularly portray their own industry as slanted toward Democrats and liberals. These perceptions, however, do not coincide with reality, as David Niven reveals in his bold new take on an often-debated subject. "Tilt? The Search for Media Bias" presents the first comprehensive review of the charges, the evidence, and the effects, beginning with a simple but altogether overlooked premise: to measure media bias or fairness, one has to have a fair baseline with which to compare coverage. Using situations in which presidents, governors, mayors, and members of Congress from different political parties have produced the same results in office, "Tilt?" compares media coverage of Democrats and Republicans in situations in which they clearly deserved equal treatment. The lack of evidence for partisan media bias is only part of the story. The media cover allegations of bias as if their industry has already been tried and convicted, while the American people readily accepted the premise that their main sources of information are selfishly slanted toward reporters' personal political agendas. Niven's findings, unmistakable and consistent, reveal that when the output of politicians is the same, media coverage follows--a conclusion that is as provocative as it is timely and necessary.
ISBN: 9780275975777Publication Date: 2002-09-30
Videos
- Racial Stereotypes and the Media Although demeaning and offensive racial stereotypes were pervasive in popular media of every kind during the 20th century, most observers would agree that the media is much more sensitive to representations of race today. But the pernicious effects of that stereotyping live on in the new racism arising from disparities in the treatment of stories involving whites and people of color in a ratings-driven news market, media-enhanced isolationism as a result of narrowcasting, and other sources. This program examines the relationship between mass media and social constructions of race from political and economic perspectives while looking at the effects media can have on audiences. A Films for the Humanities & Sciences Production. (42 minutes)
- Sexual Stereotypes in the Media Categorizing others is a part of human nature, and even as infants we divide the world into two groups—male and female—to help organize our reality. But when these stereotypes are used to make assumptions about a person’s character and value, they become gender bias or outright sexism. This program illustrates some of the commercial, cultural, psychological, and sociological forces that have shaped sexual stereotypes in the media, such as demographic segmentation and the selling of gender, the myths of alluring femininity and rugged masculinity, Jungian personality archetypes, consensus reality, stereotype threat, the hegemonic forces of agenda setting and mainstreaming, body image dysfunctions, and the theory of the male gaze. A Films for the Humanities & Sciences Production. (38 minutes)
Articles
- Examining Readers’ Evaluations of Objectivity and Bias in News Discourse Readers’ objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers detected bias in passages with stance markers, and detected objectivity in those lacking stance markers. In their metacommentary, readers tended to characterize objective texts as lacking purpose, or having a merely descriptive or expository purpose, and biased texts as exhibiting explicit interpretive or argumentative purposes. Unlike studies that locate objectivity or bias in news texts, or test it by asking about the fidelity of texts to their sources, our study examined the evaluations of readers in their interactions with texts. It shows how objectivity and bias evaluations are a multiply determined part of a communication dynamic rather than a fixed quality of a text.
